Tag Archives: editing photos

Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year. My birthday is a few days before Halloween and as a result of this, I grew up having lots of Halloween themed birthday parties over the years, and more than anything, I love to decorate for Halloween. I do have to admit, since I’ve had kids, I haven’t got as much free time to devote to this kind of thing, but as they get older, I plan to recruit and teach them all about Halloween decorating, so that one day we will have the ultimate haunted house (hee, hee)! In the meantime, I settle for decorating part of the living room and the foyer. I thought I’d share some of my pictures, and a bit about using Picnik to edit and enhance your Halloween photos.

Before I upload photos to my blog, I always edit them using Picnik. You can sign up for free, or you can pay $25/year to go pro. The main differences are the following: with the basic plan you get a few fonts and all the basic editing tools and effects (stickers, etc.) and you can upload 5 photos at a time. With Picnik Pro, you get many, many fonts (which is one of the main reasons I upgraded), you can also upload up to 100 photos at a time, and more special “effects” and “features” which the free program doesn’t include (like all of the Halloween textures and effects I’ve used below).

Here is a photo taken of my foyer unedited:

I used a tripod without a flash here… but still wasn’t able to achieve the haunted look I was going for. So… I uploaded the photo to Picnik and resized it, played with the exposure to get it just right, and sharpened the image (I almost always do these three things to ANY photo I upload). Then I added some special effects:

Here is the same photo after editing and applying the “featured” Halloween effect Scary Movies. I also applied a Matte effect to give it the white glow around the edges.

Better!

Here’s the same photo again:

This time I changed the image to black and white, and applied a Halloween “texture” to the background (all those spiderweb lines you see). I also added a few graveyard stickers to the bottom of the photo next to the ghoul. These stickers are great because you can change the size of them as well as overlap them, to make them appear nearer or farther away.

Here’s another unedited photo of my tablescape on the other side of the foyer:

Not bad, but could use improvement…

You can really notice how much sharper the image is. I added a little spider web just for fun.

Tablescape #2 – Before:

Tablescape #2 – After:This may be one of my new favorite effects – focal black and white!! You can choose which object you want the color focus on and shrink or enlarge the focal size. I also added a black Vignette to the image (which is the black shadow around the picture).

These hanging bats I made years ago from Martha Stewart templates:

Here they are cropped and softened with a Matte effect:

I cut these Halloween bottle labels out of one of my old Martha Stewart (Halloween Edition) magazines and glued them on – Unedited version:

After editing:

I applied a Holga-ish (don’t ask me what that means or does exactly, but it looks cool) effect and softened the photo.

I hope this inspires you to take your Halloween photos and spookify them!!

I have only been using the Picnik program for a few months, but I have to say that I have found it to be really easy to learn and use! I’m not being paid to say any of this, but I definitely think it’s worth the $25/year… especially if you are planning on creating any photo books for your family.

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Hi! I'm Kathryn, mommy to an adorable princess and handsome prince, and wife to a very patient and supportive hubby. Painting furniture is my own form of meditation! I love all things diy, thrifting and decorating and have created this blog as a creative outlet and to share my ideas with you! I hope you enjoy your visit and come back soon!